“Constructed on No Known Paradigm”: Novelistic Form and the Southern City in Cormac Mccarthy’S Suttree

“Constructed on no known paradigm”: Novelistic Form and the Southern City in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree Andrew James Dykstal Bachelor of Arts, Hillsdale College, 2013 A thesis presented to the graduate faculty of the University of Virginia in candidacy for the degree of Master of Arts Department of English University of Virginia April 2017 Dykstal 1 This thesis is dedicated to my peers and teachers at UVA and Hillsdale College, with particular bows to Jerry McGann—my thesis director—and to Michael Levenson, both mentors whose patience, encouragement, and graceful professionalism have shaped my thinking and my aspirations; to Fred and Carol Langley and the members of the American Legion whose generosity made possible my graduate education; and to my grandfather Cornelius Dykstal, who departed the world on the day I completed this project and whose wry humor and dignity throughout the twilight of his years embody the qualities back cover blurbs are always insisting I ought to find in Cormac McCarthy’s books. I would also like to thank friends who read drafts and housemates who tolerated my sometimes excessive monopolization of the kitchen table. Their days of eating breakfast amid unreasonable stacks of books have at long last come to a close. Dykstal 2 “Like their counterparts in northern cities, business leaders in the New South came to acknowledge the social disorder of their cities as regrettable byproducts of the very urban-industrial world they had championed. Drunkenness, prostitution, disease, poverty, crime, and political corruption were all understood as symptoms of the moral and physical chaos the lower classes fell into in the modern city….It was the instinctive reaction of the business class to respond with efforts to bring order to the urban world they inhabited.” —Don H. Doyle, New Men, New Cities, New South, 260 “Despising for you the city, thus I turn my back. There is a world elsewhere.” —Shakespeare, Coriolanus, 3.3.134-5 Dykstal 3 Jay Aaron Beavers begins his recent treatment of God in Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree with the observation that scholarship has yet to find a stable, dominant set of readings.1 The problem is not one of critical quality; the various diametrically opposed positions, most obviously inheritors of Vereen Bell’s anti-thematic reading and the more mythically-minded interpretations, are a natural product of a work both richly intertextual and possessed of several generic features, and yet unassimilated under any single source, specific literary tradition, or philosophical school. Suttree’s position in McCarthy’s corpus adds to the interpretive challenge. The novel’s texture differs from his previous work even as it retains parallel characters and set pieces, and it bears startlingly little resemblance to the Southwest novels in general and Blood Meridian in particular. Scholarship on McCarthy’s overall project—already sharply divided—thus faces the question of how Suttree fits into this project and, more precisely, whether it marks a significant shift from his first three Appalachia novels. Even a brief survey of current scholarship suggests how unsettled criticism remains regarding Suttree, particularly the novel’s setting in a historically accurate, detailed Knoxville which is simultaneously mimetically exact and seemingly overrun with mythic associations. The practical consequence of extant readings is a tendency of McCarthy’s Knoxville to disappear, and with it the broader issue of what an urban setting means for the investments and “southernness” of the work that concludes, until the publication of The Road twenty-seven years later, McCarthy’s cycle of Appalachian novels. While the urban qualities of Suttree have not gone wholly neglected, little serious effort has been made to stand this literary Knoxville in relation to McCarthy’s hinterland inventions or to understand this setting within the framework of “the southern city.” A city/hinterlands Dykstal 4 divide (or proletariat/bourgeoisie divide) may or may not be a profitable critical path, but it has been widely assumed to exist between Suttree and older works, and even when unpursued as such has likely contributed to a general neglect of examining the role Knoxville plays in the shape of the novel. This is startling, as the Knoxville of Suttree is an intensely particular locale that blends mimetic with imaginative work at several registers, and an engine of complexity which contributes significantly, in my judgment, to the novel’s formal properties. There is, however, one extant piece of scholarship which provides a starting point for parsing the city: Louise Jillett’s “Flânrie, Vagrancy, and Voluntary Exile in Suttree.” Jillett examines the character possibilities specific to a successor to Poe’s London, tracing the thread through Whitman’s New York and the Paris of Baudelaire and Walter Benjamin before arriving in McCarthy’s Knoxville (Jillett 145). There, we meet with familiar urban and pastoral archetypes: the Ragpicker, the Railroader, the Junkman, the Goat-herder; as well as a few new ones, specific to the American landscape: the Indian, the African American Crone; and of course, we have Suttree himself: the Flâneur (though he is not named as such). (145-6) The diversity of these figures, dense on the ground of Knoxville, magnify Suttree’s class- crossing motion, and the various spaces they inhabit—or are excluded from—provide wide-ranging sites of encounter for Suttree himself, foregrounding his reactions (160-1). Jillett focuses her analysis mainly on memory, but her work suggests the role a persistent past and the capacity for mythopoeia could play in Suttree’s engagement with his surroundings. This possibility—that McCarthy’s Knoxville is foremost a set of sites of Dykstal 5 encounter—opens a series of interpretive avenues that, followed to their conclusion, promise to make sense of Suttree’s setting. First, a focus on the interplay between Cornelius Suttree and Knoxville, coupled with McCarthy’s own time in the city and the autobiographical valences of Suttree, echoes at a different register Lewis Simpson’s argument in his The Fable of the Southern Writer, which I will revisit in more detail later in the argument. For now, one of his notes on Faulkner is instructive: Indeed, by virtue of a civilized commitment to letters that was still taken for granted, the writer of the twentieth-century American South bore a relation to the large body of writing, imaginative and critical, which for five centuries recorded the complex story of the conquest of the older community by the modern order—and in so doing created out of the drama of differentiation the large, many-faceted secular myth of the self’s encounter with history…. As demonstrated by his efforts to express and define it in his early writings and by his complex realization of it in the creation and peopling of Yoknapatawpha County, Mississippi (a more audacious undertaking than Hardy’s creation and peopling of Wessex), Faulkner’s involvement in this myth is the major aspect of his career. (Simpson 97) The (re)creation and peopling of Knoxville, if Knoxville is indeed implicated in “the conquest of the older community by the modern order,” marks McCarthy’s engagement with a southern mythos which includes the city/hinterlands divide and the rise of urbanization following the fall of the plantation South. Suttree’s intertexts, some of them Dykstal 6 concerned with failure and decline, certainly suggest this reading. I contend that Knoxville’s role is more complex, but the idea of authorial encounter remains central to the following argument—as does a vision of the South as caught in its own history. The second avenue invited by Suttree’s motion of encounter and eventual flight touches on Anthony Dyer Hoefer’s Apocalypse South. Hoefer traces the form and figure of apocalypse through the southern literary imagination in various incarnations, using the twinned possibilities of judgment and salvation to theorize, among other things, space and place in the South. In his treatment of Light in August, Hoefer frames the perceived fragility of Yoknapatawpha before the threat of miscegenation as the motive underlying the racial violence in the novel, and the factitious nature of this fragility provokes revelations beyond the reach of the novel’s characters: The sum of this multifaceted engagement with Apocalypse is a drive to reconsider history—to reinterpret the signs of the times. This jeremiad, both particularly southern and American, imagines the collapse of a society unwilling and unable to accept the revelations offered by the myriad catastrophes of its past, and it suggests that the consequences of this cycle of disasters are not limited to the South. (Hoefer 24) Here, Hoefer argues that fragility and instability stem from belief in imminent, destructive change—while that belief itself is responsible for a series of failures. The possibility of sudden change figures prominently in Suttree scholarship, usually in readings of the destruction of McAnally Flats to allow construction of an expressway. And the novel is indeed replete with ruins or signs of past social structures already passing into memory. The idea highlighted by Hoefer that most informs my reading of Dykstal 7 McCarthy’s Knoxville, though, is the false impression that social or personal or political change necessarily annihilates older forms. An impression of the city as the successor to the rural or agrarian is an oversimplification, as is the general identification of the city, and its attendant industrialization, as the antagonist of all features of the pre-bellum South. The city is, in various ways, an avatar of the North, but this does not exclude from its boundaries traditionally southern vices and virtues. In Hoefer’s formulation, a southern jeremiad can be an American jeremiad. Nor does an impression of imminent change necessarily have a basis in reality—efforts to politically or philosophically defer an imaginary collapse can produce exactly the signs and symptoms taken as sure proof of the coming apocalypse.

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